62 million dollars on Watson with no clinic
In November 2016 the University of Texas System audit office found that the MD Anderson cancer centre had paid external firms 62.1 million dollars for the Oncology Expert Advisor, an adviser built on IBM Watson technology, and that the system was not in clinical use and not connected to the hospital's new medical record.
Why it matters
A medical project built on Watson ended in a document with no result for patients. It is an audit of procurement, not of accuracy: the report expressly declines to judge the system's scientific basis.
The IBM contract of June 2012, 2.4 million dollars for six months, was extended 12 times to 39.2 million; of six non-competitive procurements worth 51.4 million, two, worth 41.7 million, lacked a justification; fees, the report says, were consistently set just below the amount needing Board approval. The system began with myelodysplastic syndrome and added five more leukaemias and lung cancer; pilots ran on the old records system, protocol data had gone stale, and IBM ended support for the pilot version from 1 September 2016. The subject is MD Anderson's own system, not IBM's Watson for Oncology product: that name does not appear in the report. The record does not claim the internal IBM documents on unsafe recommendations reported by the press.